* This item was also used in the 1992 National Adult Literacy Survey (NALS).

This item has a difficulty level of 387, meaning that people must possess a skill level of 387 to have an 80% probability of performing this task correctly. It is interesting to speculate about why interpreting this poem, with only seventeen words, is more difficult than the proceeding task about Tom Wicker's New York Times article. The latter has several hundred words and numerous sentences. Yet it was easier for more people to synthesize the main argument from Wicker's article than to say what the poet was trying to express in the brief poem above. According to the YALS, only 8.8 percent of the young adult population possessed Prose skill levels of 375 or above. So fewer than one in ten young adults would be expected to perform the poetry interpretation task correctly. However, note that people with a skill level of 350 have a 61% probability of performing the task, and those at a skill level of 300 have a probability of 31 % of being able to perform the task correctly. Thus, even though only fewer than ten percent of the young adults are at the 375 level or above, more than that could be expected to perform the task if the standard for performing correctly was set lower than an 80% probability. For instance, if the standard for being defined as possessing skills at a given level were set at 60%, then the poetry item would be said to have a difficulty level of 350, and all those presently scoring at the 350 level or above (21 percent of the young adults) would be designated as possessing the skills for performing this task. This illustrates that in the YALS study, whether one is below, at, or above a given skill level depends upon the standard for performance that is established by the test developers. In the absence of any compelling basis for establishing a standard, any standard that is set is arbitrary. It represents a judgment about how good is good enough to be called proficient at a given skill level.